Movable Type Enterprise and Microsoft Office 2007: Blogs for Business

Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever -- if you're even remotely interested in technology news, you're going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.

To be honest, Windows and Office aren't always known for being the most cutting-edge platforms. But at Six Apart, we've got some very cool demos about ways that you can connect these decades-old platforms to the latest innovations in blogging. And you might be surprised to see that even some people who work at Microsoft are using these tools themselves.

Some background: A year ago, we showed off some cool ideas about blogging with Office at the MIX06 conference that Microsoft held in Las Vegas. (There's even video online -- just skip past the showgirl and the Elvis impersonator.) Now the technology demo we showed off last year is something that you can actually deploy.

You see, we’re not gonna be happy until every company can have a blog. To get everybody using blogs at work, we have to connect with the tools people are already using. Some of that's already happened -- you can use Movable Type Enterprise with your Oracle database or build templates in Adobe's Dreamweaver. But the big Kahuna of office apps is Office. And Office 2007 is surprisingly good, so it makes it even more attractive to plug it in to the power of blogs.

Okay, enough talk. Let’s see what blogging with MT Enterprise and Office 2007 looks like:

• Post to your Movable Type blog right from Microsoft Word. How well does this work? You’re reading a post created in Word 2007 right now.

• Publish your Movable Type blog posts in Microsoft Word format. We’ve been talking about this idea for years, but imagine the potential – if you’ve got a guy in your office who is afraid of blogs but just wants to get his information delivered on his desk in the format he’s used to, now you can do that. What about just publishing each category archive as a Word document, so you can have a single file with all the information about that topic?
• Support for feeds in Outlook 2007. There are tons of things you can do with feeds that get more powerful in Outlook – every tag has its own feed in MT Enterprise, and of course every blog does, too. But you can make feeds across all the blogs in your system, so you can do cool things like having every post tagged “important” go into a single folder in Outlook, where you can make a macro to turn them into to-dos.
• And lots more. There’s all kinds of other opportunities with the new Microsoft platforms. OpenSearch support in IE7 lets you automatically perform searches of your intranet blogs right in your browser. XML-based formats for PowerPoint and Excel mean you can actually pull in live data from your blogs into presentations or spreadsheets. And we’re sure the best stuff hasn’t even been thought of yet.

More of this kind of integration is on the way; Movable Type Enterprise already integrates with platforms like Microsoft’s SQL Server. But we wanted to make sure that, amidst all the other news of the day, nobody misses the fact that two of the most popular software platforms around are finally ready for business when it comes to blogs.